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Marketing to Seniors

Lesson 33 from: Business for Photographers

Sandy Puc

Marketing to Seniors

Lesson 33 from: Business for Photographers

Sandy Puc

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Lesson Info

33. Marketing to Seniors

Lesson Info

Marketing to Seniors

I told you the kids kind of disappear and I never really thought about it until really until this new project I'm doing. Because I knew that they disappeared and I always thought it was sort of Ah, you know, that's just the way it is. That's just what the market is. I worked with babies and kids, and then they're gone. But but having this emotional connection of them seeing him in the last four years come back as high school seniors has been really intriguing to me because these kids, the thing you have to remember is the seniors themselves. Unless their parents are pretty consistent on family portrait, they don't really have a relationship with me anymore. The parents do so the parents are very emotionally connected. I do. But seniors, especially boys, kind of walk off. You know, that kind of walking girls will come in with fluffy everything and ah, lot of them have portrait in their house, so they recognize who I am. But guys tend to be a little more standoffish to shirts and the sam...

e shorts. And I'm not doing this. I don't want to be here kind of thing. So so It's kind of fun to work with them and sort of break down those barriers. And it's really fun to talk to them about their images because the one thing that I don't have a very good memory of a very bad short term memory. But for whatever reason, every child I photograph I can see everything I ever did with them, especially the ones that are baby plant clients, etcetera. So we were doing a session last Sunday. The boy that was there, he was 15 years old and I did his baby plan. Siri's who's 15 and when he showed up. He, of course, is this big football player like super deep voice, 15 years old, and I'm talking about kind of joking around with them, and he was kind of being all stoic and serious. And it wasn't until we remembered I remember that he loved the chicken like, loved the chicken, and I made a joke about the chicken and all the sudden his eyes, like he totally remember that. And then his mom proceeded to tell me that he loved the chicken so much that they spent weeks trying to find the chicken because he wouldn't let up. And so they finally bought him his own chicken. And so he had is over. And by the time we're talking about that, he was having so much fun, like, you know, making jokes and even in the session 15 year old and he's taking pictures with the chicken and he's making the chicken face. And, you know, that was just those little things that you see those barriers breakdown and you realize that you will always have a connection to these people, the parents more so because they emotionally invested and financially invested. But even the Children, even after years, I mean, I hadn't seen him for over probably 10 years. He finished the diploma Siri's and hadn't seen me. But it wasn't me that got the broke the barrier. It was that darn chicken. It was that memory of, and he would have been five years old or four or five years old when they bought the chicken, and he never forgot chick, and he never forgot the value of the chicken. So so that's been really fun and even, and it was kind of funny cause even when we were there, like I said, He started off being a tough teenager, started cracking jokes and on the way out he turned to his mom and he said they were walking away. He's like she couldn't take my senior pictures. I was like, That's so cool. Like I was so excited cause I knew I connected with him. Teoh and I was just like, That's That's that circle that we talked about. So we're going to go forward. We're gonna jump into seniors and talk about marketing seniors. I know we cut it today, a quick version, I think yesterday or the day before of what we do. But I'm actually break it down and kind of give you a senior marketing plan. Before we do that. Let's take a look at some pretty pictures. It's kind of bring it on, all right. So as I said before, I always pegged as a baby photographer and the Children. I don't mind that at all, But the truth is, I photographed seniors to our percentages now are down because I we talked earlier about how when I was trying to grow my business and I was had 32 people working for me and seven photographers and life was crazy. Um, I had we were photographing almost 400 seniors a year, and over the time we've raised our prices substantially. We've changed our system substantially. The industry and the market has changed substantially. So we've now. Last year, as I said, I photographed less than 100. But our sales average were probably five times what they were even five or six years ago. So So we're very happy with a more targeted market. We now know in the senior industry that these students will take their own pictures. They're going to be doing their own thing. There's there's kind of that inconsistency out there right now with with who? They're photographers going to be in the color and the look in the style. So So the one thing we can say is we put a lot of time and energy into making these images uniquely their own. We want these kids to know when you come to us, we're going to showcase who you are. We're gonna make it about you unlike any other studio, right down to the implementation of video which will talk about as well, so marketing to seniors. One of The advantages I have is the majority of the clients I photograph are actually clients that have been with me for 10 or more years. My price point is a little different. We haven't just like everything else. We have an associate price, and we have a master's price. My sessions do have a minimum of $1500. I think it's $ order. Plus there's a $500 session fees. So I know when I walk out to shoot a senior that they're going to spend about 2000. They have to spend about $ in order to work with me. So those are always the clients who have been with me for years and years. Those were people that knew they were gonna come to me, and they know that they're going to invest. The associate sessions, however, have AH range of prices, depending on how many outfits, not so much how many outfits, but how long they want Teoh work with us and what they want. Do they want just studio only. Do they want indoor outdoor etcetera. So we give them options and so that kind of it's got a nice because I know what I'm working with a senior there, probably somebody really special to me. There's somebody that I know that I probably worked with for years. We do have a substantial amount of them that our clients who are referred by somebody, but they're usually in the same income bracket. So they're people who kind of go into it knowing I hear that all the time. I hear Dad's with this project we're working on every day, and that will say, Well, you've always been the most expensive thing we do all year long Ha ha ha. You know what I'm like? Ha, ha, It's not funny, but I'm glad you know that. I'm glad you recognize that They know that were expensive and I don't think I mean, there's a little bit of status there for people that feel like I invest in Sandy's work. I I spend more than you do, and we hear that often. I had a client recently who wanted to dio she want to do a fundraiser. We've got a great fundraiser program and she's been a client. She just did a video, a legacy video. Her kids have been with us for 10 years, she We told her about a fundraising program and she took it. Teoh her to this group for high school. They were doing a fundraiser and she took it to them and she was so excited. She wrote me this like long email, saying, Oh my gosh, that was the coolest thing She's like I had so much status when people found out that I knew you and I talked to you She's like, You're such a rock star in this community and it's super cheese with cheese on top. But it was really appreciate it cause for her it was when people, when she said Yes, I know her and yes, she'll do this for us and you guys, this is an incredible deal. You need to take it up. She had sold 25 gift certificates before she left that night. She didn't have the materials to sell them, but she was selling them just based off of the fact that she had invested in us and her friends were like, We want to do that too, so so that's where it gets really, really exciting. Now there's all kinds of marketing. There's, of course, traditional marketing, which is postcards, displays, yearbook ads, referral programs, senior family promotion, custom graduation announcements. The other day, when you asked, What do you do for seniors? We have something. We have almost two things every month that we're marketing for seniors all year long. No matter whether it's the season or not. We're trying to keep our name out there. So we do have traditional postcards. And the biggest thing is, where do you get the names and the information? Because that's always the quandary everybody has is, you know, I don't know anyone. So where do you get the names you used to be able to buy the list? Student directories, some schools? And this is This is really how it works In rural areas. You can walk right in the school and they'll give it to you some areas they'll sell it to other areas. I mean, we're in Littleton, Colorado, for heaven's if you ever want to see protected schools. I mean, we have, you know, unfortunately, have had some serious tragedies in our community toe where the schools are very, very protective. So we have a couple things. All of us right now have high school students. So we have the directory so as funny and my employees. I didn't plan it this way, but they're every five major schools that we work with. I have an employee that has a child in all of them, so we have access to the directories right now. Someday that's not gonna be so easy. But there are other things you could do one of the most important things you could dio, and it sounds crazy, but I'm telling if you really want to be in business in 15 years, plan for it now because you have these babies coming through on these baby programs, every single one of them, You should be putting start a little file. We did this about 10 years ago, and it's so crazy that it actually found out little file off the graduating year, the year that they would be a senior. You just put the the mom's name, the child's name and the school that they go to. We turned of moms with five year olds and say Hey, by the way we have I know it's a long ways off, but since you're finishing the diploma program, that's great high school senior program. Do you want us to contact you when he's a senior and they're like, Yeah, that would be great. We just say, OK, what school does he go? Teoh. What's his graduating year? I pulled the folder with that year and we stick his information, something that I thought was so dumb when I did it. And now you can pull a file and you've literally got 50 kids names that were seniors for this school. Those are your ambassadors, those air, your spirit sessions, those people that already love you, that you just want to get out, get to them first and say, Hey, remember we did you know we were your baby photographer? We'd love to have you back. It's creating that connection. So So if you have a database system that you could just do it that way, that's a great idea. If you don't, I had a file. It was like a folder, a file folder like this, and inside it it had a list of the client's name, their kids age names and ages and every child that they had put them in the right year, and it's become a gold mine now, and what seemed like 10 years seems so far away is now for me. It's here and now and now we have all that access. So So my point is, it's never too early to start planning. Now is the time to work on your future marketing. Now is the time to work on your current marketing as well. Direct mail. There is the option of buying a list. I don't It's the same thing as the baby list, as I don't highly recommend it. There are companies out there that cell specific to high school senior names. He finally bought one because I wanted to try it out. And it's exactly what I thought. We took our student directories and we took the senior list. The current that would juniors that would be seniors. We went to the entire list alphabetically to try to find these kids, and we found three out of what should have been 600 names. So it's one of those things. Where is it worth it? Not really, but it's not, I would say, if you you know, if you feel you want to try it, go for it. You might have some success. You never know what the rial numbers are, but it's not really to me. The most successful waits out the right way to do it right out of the gate. With our mailings, we typically do an actual physical mailing peace. May, June, July, August and September. Important things like pay for first class postage because then you get the kickbacks. Anything that is not a good address will come back to you. You should always pay for first class postage on the first mailing that you dio is a little more expensive. But then all of those kickbacks you can take them out of your system, and then you're not going to be paying postage on them later. Because if not, if you do bulk mail, then every time you send out your bowl quail, there's a good third of your mail that maybe going to nobody and you kind of want to know that so at least once a year, do like we do it with our newsletters once a year, do a newsletter and send it instead of maybe sending out to 5000 people, send it to your top 1000 shoppers and use first class mail and then guess what? You're going to get a whole chunk of big stack of kickbacks and you're gonna be able to take about a system these people have moved, have gone out of state, and you don't want to keep spending year after year after year sending them things when they don't exist. Because, remember, after a year, nothing is forwarded anymore. It just goes to whoever's in that house, which is probably not the right person. So just keep that in mind. There is the company student list dot com. I am not recommending them. I'm not not recommending them either. By the way, I'm just saying that they exist. And if you want to look into it, it is certainly an option for you. There are other alternative ways to market schools, have newspapers. If you're gonna run an ad, be seen, make it nice and big, do a full page ad. Honestly, if you were to ask me what I feel about newspapers, I don't feel like they do a whole lot of good. I've never seen anything come from them. They're expensive. What's happened now is our schools have now kind of created packages and you get student, you get the newspaper, you get to be in the yearbook and you get to be what's called a preferred photographer, which means you're listed in alphabetical order as a preferred. These students can go to you because we have the choice of our students can pick who they go to. Some places you have a contract photographer and you just have to go to that person. Photographers get business for people who want something a little bit better, but with the package is usually a preferred photographer packages anywhere from to $450 a year. But that gives you all of those three or four benefits, none of which four out of you know, three out of four of them. I don't even think of any value being on the preferred photographer list is value, so we have to pay the premium because, ah, lot of parents like assault kind of blindly go. OK, here is the graduation announcements we have to buy. These here is the preferred photographer. We have to pick these, and if in the best photographer in town, if you're not on that list, there's not gonna consider you because you're not preferred by the school. Reality is, all that means is you paid the school money to get on that list and anybody can do it. And believe me, there's some not so great photographers and there's some really exceptional ones as well. But you don't have control over that. So that's just something you have to do. We also advertise in studio. We do have a studio poster. We have things up so we can remind people that we exist. We're constantly marketing all the time. So some of our marketing is outside of the necessarily looking for new senior students. A lot of it is things like, Ah, wallet, reorder email. That was This one says, Don't wait, Order more wallets. Eso were constantly reminding people that Hey, if you ran out of wallet, you're gonna want those. Those are those are some of the things that we do. We also have I mentioned graduation Like where I told you that little trick that we do, we every pretty much every senior is going to spend a certain amount, and they're gonna always get 53 graduation announcements. But if I have one of those in here. Yeah, so? So this is an example of a graduation announcement. This is Hannah's 2013. Hannah got five of these for free. So it says that they're proud to announce her graduation from Rock Canyon school and when her party is gonna be or when the graduation is gonna be these were free toe Hannah. Five of them. But mom would have totally forgot. Mom ordered the summer before, so she's not gonna remember that she has is coming. We have to pick up the phone. We have to call her, but just say Hey, by the way, you have a graduate waste announcements. Announcements ready? We just need this information moms like Oh, yeah, I forgot about that. You know what? How many do I get? Five. That's not gonna be enough. How much is 20 or how much is 50? How much would it cost to get 50 more? And we give them a great deal on him because they've already placed a substantial order and that gives us the ability to instigate those sales were actually controlling whether or not people are going to buy these. If we just sent them an e blast. Only that said, Hey, don't forget to buy graduation announcements. 90% of them would say, Oh, I already did it at the school because the school has those ugly little, you know, traditional ones that shouldn't say ugly. But, um, when they hear about this all of a sudden like, Oh, you know, I order from the school, I'm gonna counsel those and let's get these. These are way better. So we instigate marketing in advance. Other things that we have to dio in our preferred photographer Yearbook ads are included in that. So again to a full page your book. I do. I don't think we get a whole lot of business from it. But if I had a choice of the paper, the school paper, the yearbook, I would say be in the yearbook more than the school paper because the yearbook, the kids will say that they go back. And that kind of flip through the back of the book are all the photographers, and they kind of flip through and they always look at who's in there, if at all possible, try to make sure that the students in your ad are students from that school. That's really important to just because you may have, Ah, whole row of awesome images that you love. But kids are going to relate more to Pete faces. They recognize you can't pick and choose who is popular and who's not popular. Try to get a good range if you have a football player. Usually they're pretty popular cheerleader. They're pretty popular, a drama kids usually outgoing and fun off. But we like to consider ourselves We you know, we love to photograph everybody. Everybody's unique itself, and so we try to put a little bit of everybody in there. We are definitely not the studio. When there is one in our community, we're not the studio that only takes cheerleaders and football players. In fact, we are known for being kind of eclectic, and we'll do crazy, cool things like take you out on your bikes or, you know, whatever you if you parachute, we will parachute with you. If we get a really cool shot out of it, we want to be uniquely different newsletters. We do a newsletter that's early in the spring. We send that out. It's the more informational peace. So it's going usually two people that are on in our database that are of the right age. So we're kind of giving them the heads up that, Hey, summer's coming. And so you need to be ready for your senior pictures and hear some things that you need to keep in mind that you need to be aware of for your pictures now. I mentioned earlier that we have ah, spirit session, which is similar to what people call ambassador sessions. The differences ambassadors. Usually when somebody has an ambassador program, they're getting a student in and they're gonna photograph them and then there that soon his job is to get out there and to market studio, and usually they get free products or something to do that. Our spirit sessions are a little different. We try to celebrate the school and school sort of school spirit is the idea behind it, so we may get somebody to get a bunch of their friends in. So let's say Madison here was in charge. She was a spirit coordinator. She got 8 to 10 of her friends to come in in January and February, and, of course, in Colorado, It's snowy and cold, miserable. So it might be a studio session. It might be that we're going right out in the snow and get something really cool and edgy out in the snow or whatever. They try to top each other, which is kind of fun. They always try to outdo each other. We've done pictures, standing and fountains with umbrellas. We've done snowboarding. I mean, we've done a little bit of everything, but her job is to get a bunch of kids together, and we're gonna do the spirit session. Eso What's gonna happen is she has a coordinator packet, and that packet is gonna kind of tell her what the program is. The spirit coordinators come in with their parents, and we do a consultation with them all. They get a what? What to expect, guy. This kind of covers what you need to know, and they get a benefits guide what you're going to get for doing this for us from there, those kids become our coordinators, and then we give them the tools to market. So, for instance, we're going to send them a J. Paige of a an e blast and they can send it out to their friends and say, Hey, do you want to be on our spirit group? They can talk to their friends would give them cards, toe hand out. We get them excited about it now, if possible, if possible. We have a meeting with them. The Spirit coordinator meeting with their parents. We talked to them. They have to fill in an application. We want more information about them. Includes the name, contact, hobbies, activities, awards. And we was asked them some philosophical questions. We tell him it's homework, but I want to get to know their personalities. Teoh, I will tell you that you're looking for somebody very gregarious, somebody that's excited and passionate, who likes themselves, who are comfortable in their own skin, who loves clothing and fashion. It comes up, but girls air far better choices than guys, for the most part, just to give you an idea of the path. In December, we start looking at the seniors that we already have those of the babies that we've been photographing for years. We're looking through them. January and February were contacting the leads and setting up the appointments march in April, when I say shoot like you mean it. I just mean that you have to realize you've not been shooting seniors for three or four or five months, so you're kind of out of sync. So we really push ourselves on the creative in because what this does for us is this gets us creative before regular paying seniors come. So we're already in the senior mode by the time really paying clients come in. I feel really good about where I am because I always have. Whenever you take breaks from something when I'm on the road for a while and I come back for sessions I know I'm a good photographer, but I'm a way better photographer. What? I'm in sync with my lighting with my equipment with my with the where the sun is in the universe. I mean, for me if I have on a bus tour bus for, like, two months and I get off the bus and I go to shoot the sun changes and the places that I was shooting before I left are different because of the way the sun changes. So I want to make sure I'm in sync with what I'm doing and that my paying clients are getting the very best. They're not getting the holy crap. How do I do this again? You know they're getting the best of who I am. The other thing that I can recommend from a social media standpoint, if you're gonna take the time to do these spirits sessions to put the time into it and this is one that we failed for many years, show off those images. There's no point doing it if nobody ever sees it. So this is where social media posting becomes so important. The other thing that's really critical is keeping up speed wise. You can't do a fun event like this and then tell the kids within 6 to 8 weeks these images will be online. They want them there that night. It's really a pain to coordinate that and to get that done, and then we have to sacrifice a lot to make it happen. But the years that we put time into social media and making it rock, we've killed at the years that we get lazy or we don't have the right staff to help us make that happen. I feel that we fail so that's really important. I mentioned that girls tend to rocket and it really is true. We have nothing against boys, I promise. But remember, a coordinator or an ambassador, somebody that represents you, They have toe have the tenacity and the strength to get out there and rave about you and talk about you and put you in people's faces. Guys tend to not care as much about that Now. Have I had guy coordinators? Absolutely. Most of them have very strong personalities. They tend to b'more into fashion and their looks and styling there who toe work with. I love it, but I've had probably two or three guys really rocket for me. The rest and it's hundreds. I'm sure at this point of females that absolutely get out there and do it. That Spirit coordinator meeting is so important because you're gonna get to know that person, and it's okay if somebody you just don't feel like they're the right material. It's kind of up to you. We kind of go where I'm kind of stand on. The Fed's with this because sometimes I feel like I don't wanna let somebody go. That may be really wants this but is afraid. I mean, I have horror stories of, you know, when I did attempt to go to high school, things that I tried to like, You're not gonna believe this. I totally tried to try out for cheerleader. I did. It was way better than beating him up, but I couldn't tell you to this day. I remember walking into that gym and I don't know what possessed me to attempt that. I walked into the gym. It was try out. I didn't even make it past the gym just past the bathroom where you change. And I sat there. Look at all these giggly girls, had a complete panic attack and left crying my because I just emotionally couldn't connect with that. So So for me, I remember those dramatic moments, and I remember how hard it was for me to relate to people. So when I see somebody there that doesn't obviously chose to be there because they felt like they were the right person, maybe they don't have that personality. Maybe they were like me. Maybe there were somebody who just wants it so bad, but doesn't know how to get there. And I don't want to be the person that axes them and tells them up. You're not You're not happy enough. You're not cute enough. You're not good enough. So? So we don't necessarily pick and choose. But we recognize that if there's somebody that just doesn't have that tenacity, maybe we need to pick two or three from that school and then just see where it goes. Because sometimes people can surprise you. Sometimes people can really, really impress you. Honestly, the few that I've seen that maybe aren't the right exactly the right people honestly tend to be not exactly right. People in the long run, they don't do much more than I expected. But you know what? At least I gave him the chance. At least I didn't cut them off. I wasn't one more thing in their life that they just didn't, you know, didn't get right. So So you need a therapist or anything by now? Are we getting mental health? Break. All right, we're gonna finish up to this seniors if we can. So the spirit sessions, We want to make it really exciting. We want to have the makeup and hair not so much that they want their mayor hair and makeup done. It just gives it that styling. It feels like it's something special. We want to make sure we provide them websites, images for Facebook. We're gonna get them up as quick as we can. We create art cards there about this size that it's almost like a model had, Shata said. Sheikh, which shows their images that they can give to their friends on day, always have an offer on it. Bring this card in and you get whatever free wallets, whatever it is, some of the things that we're changing that we dio we always dio unveiling party. So that's a lot of fun, because what we do is we have the students. They have to invite their friends. Basically, they have a number. They have been like this many friends, the unveiling. So if each student invites five or 10 friends and you have 15 students, that's a whole lot of kids. They're going to come to this party. Their parents are not allowed. We have pizza music fun. If you don't have a studio space that can control that, then think about working with a local clothing store pizza company here. Just look around and find somebody that you could work with. I see Molly's heads nodding, Your planning one of these, aren't you? You do porter parties. Perfect. So you kind of get the idea. So don't worry about location. If you don't have one, you can find one. Honestly, there's always a place that will work with you. What pizza place is not gonna want you to come in and pay for pizza for 50 kids? They'll let you stick your images up on the wall if they have a party room to start thinking out of the box and not and don't get into that. Well, I don't have a studio, so that's not gonna work for me mode. All right, One of the things that you could do, You can have contests. You can try to get these kids to work harder for you kids. They're not really motivated by incentives like they used to be. We used to give cash for referrals to kids. Kids don't care about cashing in. I don't know where they get all their money from, but it's not like they're like 10 bucks. My mom will give me that or something I don't know. I don't know what they do to get money, but it just doesn't seem like money. Eight years ago, 10 years ago, cash was a big deal. These kids were really motivated. Now they're not a week in a senior show on SP TV recently, and we did a focus group and it was one of those kind of pain. Things that I was like I was not gonna work was the most powerful thing that came out of that. If you're an SPU member, though, I should tell you every show I've ever produced is on SPU. So you have access to all these. I would highly encourage you if your senior photographer to go in if you bought the book. You're now an SPU member. You have access to every video where we're putting up every tour I've ever done. It's all there. Well, this senior show that we did, we did this focus group of these seniors and then their parents and I thought it was gonna be kind of dumb, but I wanted to break it up a little bit. Everybody loved it. In fact, I will always do focus groups because of this, But it was interesting because the seniors blew my mind with the stuff that they told me in this focus group. Like for instance, I asked them. I said, Okay, what would be more important to you? Would you rather win an IPad or a scholarship? And that seems like an easy answer. Every single one of them said a scholarship blew my mind because I used to do every single year we had. We used to do a contest where we gave away $1000 scholarship or an IPad or whatever, what that time it was like whatever the IPods or it was a few years ago. I did that for years, and I couldn't really. I couldn't relate what would be like. I just didn't seem like the kids cared about the scholarship that much. And the IPad was always the big deal. The parents, however, really liked the scholarship. Of course, when I when I talk to them, they were all about scholarship. I asked the kids. I said, Why did you say that in each one of them said, Well, schools really expensive and I mean I was so blown away. That and These were a collective kids. These were very unique kids. But they're thing was school was really expensive and that they knew that they were gonna have to have these and a scholarship would be way better. And maybe it's because they already owned four IPads, I don't know, but I was just really surprised that answer. So after the last five or six years, we haven't done that scholarship were now implementing that back in because it was important. Have you ever tried doing like an IPod or even like a nice touch? Or and IPad with parents with kids, not necessarily babies, But, I mean, I know a lot of 78 10 year old kids love. I touch. Have you tried that instead, like for referral, like whichever parent could refer the most person. I have never done that, but I think it's totally doable. I think it's love. They're totally and that's why parents are always like they're always taken mine. I would love to win when they could have their own always losing them. Yeah, Then they lose them, Then the parent can replace it all. They have to use your first people. I think It's a great idea. Incentives always work. Bonuses, incentives. Again, This is not a sales class, but I mean, I have hours of material on how to incentivize people to get them to make decisions, get them to spend because they feel like they're getting good deal. So absolutely. Again, all of these concepts work in any genre, no matter what kind of business you're in and photography weddings, it doesn't matter. There's always a way to incentivize people. One of the things I do want to remind you I said it. We market to seniors all year long. We don't always sell stuff all the time. There are many times in my studio that we send out a blast. Thanksgiving, Christmas, the holiday Times senior graduation right around May, when kids are graduating, we personally go through and select. If we photographed 100 seniors, we're gonna pull 100 emails and we're gonna call. We're in a Senate email to these kids and to their parents because we have both their emails and we're just gonna tell him Congratulations. It comes with a personal note for me. Really. The idea behind this is, you know, and you could only get this if you have been 17 which I'm assuming none of you skipped it. So you think back at 17 and how the entire world was in front of you. You had no idea what you were getting into Number one and you had the passion and drive to go for it. I look at every high schools. They fascinate me because I wish I could shake them. Say you don't understand how amazing you are right now because you get to be anything you want to be. Now you can go be a doctor. You can work at Wal Mart. You could be happy. You could be said, You get to choose your path. And sometimes when we look at where we are now we're in the pathway and we have this many kids in this house we have to pay for these bills. You're locked down, right? These kids are completely and totally free of all burden of all debt for the most part of all. Emotional strain and stress. Their worst day is a girlfriend broke up with, um you know, I mean, like, that's not that bad, but they have. We get one chance it feels like in life to truly have that kind of freedom, and they're standing in those shoes. And so again, you all know that my love of people, sometimes I just want to grab this good to see you just don't get it like I wish I could tell you how lucky you are and how excited you should be And they're worried about little things in reality is they have just this incredible life ahead of them. And so this e blasted. It becomes very emotional for me, but it's Hey, look, this is the time of your life. Like I know it's cliche, but you really get a go, do what you want to do and take it seriously. It's a really big deal. They were not selling anything. We're not giving anything away. It's just go and be and live and thank you for letting us be a tiny part of your life. And that's that's where we like to leave it with these kiddos. So many questions air coming in for you. People are so just energized by this since their eyes were opened. So many ah ha moments are happening, but we have time for one question before break, and this is coming from two people have similar question. One is from I'm fun sized Nick, says Sandy. How would you promote the long term programmes in a military community that that's kind of always challenging because the families turned over every few years and also S H D photography? How do you handle clients who move away part way through their program? Good question on both of those great questions with military. That's something we have aton of SPU members that our military. So you saw the June campaigns? This month's campaign. It includes a deployment special because we just have a lot of students that are in the military and have a hard time with that turnover rates. So we find that for the military, a lot of the things we do are more like deployment specials where we actually know that you know, the loved one is going away, so we're gonna give them a special for their family to start up. The harder part is when you're in the military and your moved somewhere else and you have to start up, and that's why these marketing programs are so important starting a baby program. Nobody likes to start all over. I mean, Molly's doing it. I'm moving again. Even though I'm in the same town, you're moving as well. So there, several of you that are moving and changing. It's hard turning over. But, Molly, you are a great example. We were talking about it, and you made a change. You were going to never work a Saturday again. So there is something exciting about moving because you get an opportunity to recreate yourself. So I always say, Embrace the change. Forget it can change the change, embrace the change and just roll with it and find, like the deployment special things that work for that particular brand. The second question again. Waas. It was, How do you handle clients that move away part way through their program? Right when I have a client like a baby plan client that let's say they did the three month in the six month and now they have to leave out of state, we do not give them a discount or refund. What we do is we just like the folios. We give them a folio with just the two images. Nobody really has a problem with that. They know that they already got a killer deal just two sessions alone, and the two folio is still worth $300. So we just tell them that, you know, we can't fit it. If they can fly in, they can finish the program. If not, we'll just close the program there. I don't think we've ever had anybody say I want my money back. They get that they've already got first session. They already paid for everything. So anything over and above that now, if it's if it's something where heaven forbid we failed and they wanted a refund, we certainly always treat the client. We are fine with refunds after that doesn't happen very often, but usually we just close the program and they're happy with what they got.

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

RBCSM_BonusItems.zip
RBCSM_BonusItems_ReadMe.pdf

bonus material with enrollment

RBCSM_CourseScheduleandSupplyList.pdf

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

HELLO CREATIVE WORLD! Sandy's Puc is my first course I bought from CreativeLive. Sandy Love your dedication, determination, experience and love for photography. And all that while growing the family. wow!wow! hugs from London :)

a Creativelive Student
 

Only had a chance to watch the last day and bought the program. Saw you speak in Chicago at WPPI and fell in love with your style of teaching and your love of photography. Could not wait for this program. Thank you.

Student Work

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